The Real Adventure

ROSALIND STANTON DOESN'T DISAPPEAR

Rodney found a pipe of his that he kept concealed on the premises, loaded and lighted it, sat down astride a spindling little chair that looked hardly up to his weight, settled his elbows comfortably on the back of it, and then asked his sister what Martin had meant—what was he in for?

Frederica, curled up in a corner of the sofa, finished her own train of thought aloud, first.

"She's awfully attractive, don't you think? His wife, I mean. Oh, James Randolph's, of course." She turned to Rodney, looked at him at first with a wry pucker between her eyebrows, then with a smile, and finally answered his question. "Nothing," she said. "I mean, I was going to scold you, but I'm not."

"Why, yes," he admitted through his smoke. "Randolph's wife's a mighty pretty woman. But I expect that lets her out, doesn't it?"

Frederica shook her head. "She's a good deal of a person, I should say, on the strength of to-night's showing. She kept her face perfectly through the whole thing—didn't try to nag at him or apologize to the rest of us. I'd like to know what she's saying to him now."

Then, "Oh, I was furious with you an hour ago," she went on. "I'd made such a nice, reasonable, really beautiful plan for you, and given you a tip about it, and then I sat and watched you in that thoroughgoing way of yours, kicking it all to bits. But somehow, when I see you all by yourself, this way, it changes things. I get to thinking that perhaps my plan was silly after all—anyhow, it was silly to make it. The plan was, of course, to marry you off to Hermione Woodruff."

He turned this over in his deliberate way, during the process of blowing two or three smoke rings, began gradually to grin, and said at last, "That was some plan, little sister. How do you think of things like that? You ought to write romances for the magazines, that's what you ought to do."

"I don't know," she objected. "If reasonableness counted for anything in things like that, it was a pretty good plan. It would have to be somebody like Hermione. You can't get on at all with young girls. As long as you remember they're around, you're afraid to say anything except milk and water out of a bottle that makes them furious, and then if you forget whom you're talking to and begin thinking out loud, developing some idea or other, you—simply paralyze them.

"Well, Hermione's sophisticated and clever, she's lived all over the place; she isn't old yet, and she was a brick about that awful husband of hers—never made any fuss—bluffed it out until he, luckily, died. Of course she'll marry again, and I just thought, if you liked the idea, it might as well be you."

"I don't know," said Rodney, "whether Mrs. Woodruff knows what she wants or not, but I do. She wants a run for her money—a big house to live in three months in the year, with a flock of servants and a fleet of motor-cars, and a string of what she'll call cottages to float around among, the rest of the time. And she'll want a nice, tame, trick husband to manage things for her and be considerate and affectionate and amusing, and, generally speaking, Johnny-on-the-spot whenever she wants him. If she has sense enough to know what she wants in advance, it will be all right. She can take her pick of dozens. But if she gets a sentimental notion in her head—and I've a hunch that she's subject to them—that she wants a real man, with something of his own to do, there'll be, saving your presence, hell to pay. And if the man happened to be me ...!"

Frederica stretched her slim arms outward. Thoughtful-faced, she made no comment on his analysis of the situation, unless a much more observant person than Rodney might have imagined there was one in the deliberate way in which she turned her rings, one at a time, so that the brilliant masses of gems were inside, and then clenched her hands over them.

He had got up and was ranging comfortably up and down the room.

"I know I look more or less like a nut to the people who've always known us—father's and mother's friends, and most of their children. But I give you my word, Freddy, that most of them look like nuts to me. Why, they live in curiosity shops—so many things around, things they have and things they've got to do, that they can't act or think for fear of breaking something.

"Why a man should load himself up with three houses and a yacht, a stable of motor-cars, and God knows what besides, when he's rich enough to buy himself real space and leisure to live in, is a thing I can't figure out on any basis except of defective intelligence. I suppose they're equally puzzled about me when I refuse a profitable piece of law work they've offered me, because I don't consider it interesting. All the same, I get what I want, and I'm pretty dubious sometimes whether they do. I want space—comfortable elbow room, so that if I happen to get an idea by the tail, I can swing it around my head without knocking over the lamp."

"It's a luxury though, Rod, that kind of spaciousness, and you aren't very rich. If you married a girl without anything ..."

He broke in on her with that big laugh of his. "You've kept your sense of humor pretty well, sis, considering you've been married all these years to a man as rich as Martin, but don't spring remarks like that, or I'll think you've lost it. If a man can't keep an open space around him, even after he's married, on an income, outside of what he can earn, of ten or twelve thousand dollars a year, the trouble isn't with his income. It's with the content of his own skull."

She gave a little shiver and snuggled closer into a big down pillow.

"You will marry somebody, though, won't you, Roddy? I'll try not to nag at you and I won't make any more silly plans, but I can't help worrying about you, living alone in that awful big old house. Anybody but you would die of despondency."

"Oh," he said, "that's what I meant to talk to you about! I sold it to-day—fifty thousand dollars—immediate possession. Man wants to build a printing establishment there. You come down sometime next week and pick out all the things you think you and Harriet would like to keep, and I'll auction off the rest."

She shivered again and, to her disgust, found that her eyes were blurring up with tears. She was a little bit slack and edgy to-day, anyhow.

But really there was something rather remorseless about Rodney. It occurred to her that the woman he finally did marry would need to be strong and courageous and rather insensitive to sentimental fancies, to avoid a certain amount of unhappiness.

What he had just referred to in a dozen brisk words, was the final disappearance of the home they had all grown up in. Their father, one of Chicago's great men during the twenty great years between the Fire and the Fair, had built it when the neighborhood included nearly all the other big men of that robust period, and had always been proud of it. There was hardly a stone or stick about it that hadn't some tender happy association for her. Of course for years the neighborhood had been impossible. Her mother had clung to it after her husband's death, as was of course natural.

But when she had followed him, a year ago now, it was evident that the old place would have to go. Rodney, who had lived alone with her there, had simply stayed on, since her death, waiting for an offer for it that suited him. Frederica had known that, of course—had worried about him, as she said, and in her imagination, had colored his loneliness to the same dismal hue her own would have taken on in similar circumstances.

All the same, his curt announcement that the long-looked-for change had come, brought up quick unwelcomed tears. She squeezed them away with her palms.

"You'll come to us then, won't you?" she asked, but quite without conviction. She knew what he'd say.

"Heavens, no! Oh, I'll go to a hotel for a while—maybe look up a little down-town apartment, with a Jap. It doesn't matter much about that. It's a load off, all right."

"Is that," she asked, "why you've been looking so sort of—gay, all the evening—as if you were licking the last of the canary's feathers off your whiskers?"

"Perhaps so," he said. "It's been a pretty good day, take it all round."

She got up from the couch, shook herself down into her clothes a little, and came over to him.

"All right, since it's been a good day, let's go to bed." She put her hands upon his shoulders. "You're rather dreadful," she said, "but you're a dear. You don't bite my head off when I urge you to get married, though I know you want to. But you will some day—I don't mean bite my head off—won't you, Rod?"

"When I see any prospect of being as lucky as Martin—find a girl who won't mind when I turn up for dinner looking like a drowned tramp, or kick her plans to bits, after she's tipped me off as to what she wants me to do ..."

Frederica took her hands off, stepped back and looked at him. There was an ironical sort of smile on her lips.

"You're such an innocent," she said. "You've got an idea you know me—know how I treat Martin. Roddy, dear, a girl's brother doesn't matter. She isn't dependent on him, nor responsible for him. And if she's rather sillily fond of him, she's likely to spoil him frightfully. Don't think the girl you marry will ever treat you like that."

"But look here!" he exclaimed. "You say I don't know you, whom I've lived with off and on for thirty years—don't know how you'd treat me if you were married to me. How in thunder am I going to know about the girl I get engaged to, before it's too late?"

"You won't," she said. "You haven't a chance in the world."

"Hm!" he grunted, obviously struck with this idea. "You're giving the prospect of marriage new attractions. You're making the thing out—an adventure."

She nodded rather soberly. "Oh, I'm not afraid for you," she said. "Men like adventures—you more than most. But women don't. They like to dream about them, but they want to turn over to the last chapter and see how it's going to end. It's the girl I'm worried about.... Oh, come along! We're talking nonsense. I'll go up with you and see that they've given you pajamas and a tooth-brush."

She had accomplished this purpose, kissed him good night, and under the hint of his unbuttoned waistcoat and his winding watch, turned to leave the room, when her eye fell on a heap of damp, warped, pasteboard-bound note-books, which she remembered having observed in his side pockets when he first came in. The color on the pasteboard binding had run, and as they lay on the drawn linen cover to the chiffonier, she went over and picked them up to see how much damage they'd done. Then she frowned, peered at the paper label that had half peeled off of the topmost cover, and read what was written on it.

"Who," she asked with considerable emphasis, "is Rosalind Stanton?"

"Oh," said Rodney very casually, behind the worst imitation of a yawn she had ever seen, "oh, she got put off the car when I did."

"That sounds rather exciting," said Frederica behind an imitation yawn of her own—but a better one. "Going to tell me about it?"

"Nothing much to tell," said Rodney. "There was a row about a fare, as I said. The conductor was evidently solid concrete above the collar-bone, and didn't think she'd paid. And she grabbed him and very nearly threw him out into the street—could have done it, I believe, as easily as not. And he began to talk about punching somebody's head. And then, we both got put off. So, naturally, I walked with her over to the elevated. And then I forgot to give her her note-books and came away with them."

"What sort of looking girl?" asked Frederica. "Is she pretty?"

"Why, I don't know," said Rodney judicially. "Really, you know, I hardly got a fair look at her."

Frederica made a funny sounding laugh and wished him an abrupt "good night."

She was a great old girl, Frederica—pretty wise about lots of things, but Rodney was inclined to think she was mistaken in saying women didn't like adventures. Take that girl this afternoon, for example. Evidently she was willing to meet one half-way. And how she'd blazed up when that conductor touched her! Just the memory of it brought back something of the thrill he had felt when he saw it happen.

"You're a liar, you know," remarked his conscience, "telling Frederica you hadn't had a good look at her."

On the contrary, he argued, it was perfectly justifiable to deny that a look as brief as that, was good. He wouldn't deny, however, that the thing had been a wholly delightful and exhilarating little episode. That was the way to have things happen! Have them pop out of nowhere at you and disappear presently, into the same place.

"Disappear indeed!" sneered his conscience. "How about those note-books, with her name and address on every one. And there's another lie you told—about forgetting to give them to her!"

He protested that it was entirely true. He had gone into the station with the girl, shaken hands with her, said good night, and turned away to leave the station, unaware—as evidently she was—that he still had her note-books under his arm. But it was equally true that he had discovered them there, a good full second before the girl had turned the corner of the stairs—in plenty of time to have called her back to the barrier, and handed them over to her.

"All right, have it your own way," said Rodney cheerfully, as he turned out the light.

THE SECOND ENCOUNTER

Portia Stanton was late for lunch; so, after stripping off her jacket and gloves, rolling up her veil and scowling at herself in an oblong mahogany-framed mirror in the hall, she walked into the dining-room with her hat on. Seeing her mother sitting alone at the lunch table, she asked, "Where is Rose?"

"She'll be down presently, I think," her mother said. "She called out to me that she'd only be a minute, when I passed her door. Does your hat mean you're going back to the shop this afternoon?"

Portia nodded, pulled back her chair abruptly and sat down. "Oh, don't ring for Inga," she said. "What's here's all right, and she takes forever."

"I thought that on Saturday ..." her mother began.

"Oh, I know," said Portia, "but Anne Loomis telephoned she's going to bring Dora Wild around to pick out which of my three kidney sofas she wants for a wedding present. That girl I've got isn't much good, and besides, I think there's a chance that Dora may give me her house to do. Her man's stupidly rich, they say, and richly stupid, so the job ought to be worth eating a cold egg for."

You'd have known them for mother and daughter anywhere, and you'd have had trouble finding any point of resemblance in either of them to the Amazonian young thing who had so nearly thrown a street-car conductor into the street the night before. Their foreheads were both narrow and rather high, their noses small and slightly aquiline, and both of them had slender fastidious hands.

The mother's hair was very soft and white, and the care with which it was arranged indicated a certain harmless vanity in it. There was something a little conscious, too, about her dress—an effect difficult to describe without exaggeration. It was not bizarre nor "artistic," but you would have understood at once that its departures from the prevailing mode were made on principle. If you took it in connection with a certain resolute amiability about her smile, you would be entirely prepared to hear her tell Portia that she was reading a paper on Modern Tendencies before the Pierian Club this afternoon.

A very real person, nevertheless, you couldn't doubt that. The marks of passionately held beliefs and eagerly given sacrifices were etched with undeniable authenticity in her face.

Once you got beyond a catalogue of features, Portia presented rather a striking contrast to this. Her hair was done—you could hardly say arranged—with a severity that was fairly hostile. Her clothes were bruskly cut and bruskly worn, their very smartness seeming an impatient concession to necessity. Her smile, if not ill-natured—it wasn't that—was distinctly ironic. A very competent, good-looking young woman, you'd have said, if you'd seen her with her shoulder-blades flattened down and her chest up. Seeing her to-day, drooping a little over the cold lunch, you'd have left out the adjective young.

"So Rose didn't come down this morning at all," Portia observed, when she had done her duty by the egg. "You took her breakfast up to her, I suppose."

Mrs. Stanton flushed a little. "She didn't want me to; but I thought she'd better keep quiet."

"Nothing particular the matter with her, is there?" asked Portia.

There was enough real concern in her voice to save the question from sounding satirical, but her mother's manner was still a little apologetic when she answered it.

"No, I think not," she said. "I think the mustard foot-bath and the quinine probably averted serious consequences. But she was in such a state when she came home last night—literally wet through to the skin, and blue with cold. So I thought it wouldn't do any harm ..."

"Of course not," said Portia. "You're entitled to one baby anyway, mother, dear. Life was such a strenuous thing for you when the rest of us were little, that you hadn't a chance to have any fun with us. And Rose is all right. She won't spoil badly."

"I'm a little bit worried about the loss of the poor child's note-books," said her mother. "I rather hoped they'd come in by the noon mail. But they didn't."

"I don't believe Rose is worrying her head off about them." said Portia.

The flush in her mother's cheeks deepened a little, but it was no longer apologetic.

"I don't think you're quite fair to Rose, about her studies," she said. "The child may not be making a brilliant record, but really, considering the number of her occupations, it seems to me she does very well. And if she doesn't seem always to appreciate her privilege in getting a college education, as seriously as she should, you should remember her youth."

"She's twenty," said Portia bluntly. "You graduated at that age, and you took it seriously enough."

"It's very different," her mother insisted. "And I'm sure you understand the difference quite well. Higher education was still an experiment for women then—one of the things they were fighting for. And those of us by whom the success of the experiment was to be judged ..."

"I'm sorry, mother," Portia interrupted contritely. "I'm tired and ugly to-day, and I didn't mean any harm, anyway. Of course Rose is all right, just as I said. And she'll probably get her note-books back Monday." Then, "Didn't she say the man's name was Rodney Aldrich?"

"I think so," her mother agreed. "Something like that."

"It's rather funny," said Portia. "It's hardly likely to have been the real Rodney Aldrich. Yet, it's not a common name."

"The real Rodney Aldrich?" questioned her mother. But, without waiting for her daughter's elucidation of the phrase, she added, "Oh, there's Rose!"

The girl came shuffling into the room in a pair of old bedroom slippers. She had on a skirt that she used to go skating in, and a somewhat tumbled middy-blouse. Her hair was wopsed around her head anyhow—it really takes one of Rose's own words to describe it. As a toilet representing the total accomplishment of a morning, it was nothing to boast of. But, if you'd been sitting there, invisibly, where you could see her, you'd have straightened up and drawn a deeper breath than you'd indulged in lately, and felt that the world was distinctly a brighter place to live in than it had been a moment before.

She came up behind Portia, whom she had not seen before that day, and enveloped her in a big lazy hug.

"Back to work another Saturday afternoon, Angel?" she asked commiseratingly. "Aren't you ever going to stop and have any fun?" Then she slumped into a chair, heaved a yawning sigh and rubbed her eyes.

"Tired, dear?" asked her mother. She said it under her breath in the hope that Portia wouldn't hear.

"No," said Rose. "Just sleepy." She yawned again, turned to Portia, and, somewhat to their surprise, said: "Yes, what do you mean—the real Rodney Aldrich? He looked real enough to me. And his arm felt real—the one he was going to punch the conductor with."

"I didn't mean he was imaginary," Portia explained. "I only meant I didn't believe it was the Rodney Aldrich—who's so awfully prominent; either somebody else who happened to have the same name, or somebody who just—said that was his name."

"What's the matter with the prominent one?" Rose wanted to know. "Why couldn't it have been him?"

Portia admitted that it could, so far as that went, but insisted on an inherent improbability. A millionaire, a member of one of the oldest families in the city—a social swell, the brother of that Mrs. Martin Whitney whose pictures the papers were always publishing on the slightest excuse—wasn't likely to be found riding in street-cars, in the first place, and the improbability reached a climax during a furious storm like that of last night, when, if ever during the year, the real Rodney Aldrich would be saying, "Home, James," to a liveried chauffeur, and sinking back luxuriously among the whip-cord cushions of a palatial limousine.

I hasten to say that these were not Portia's words; all the same, what Portia did say, formed a basis for Rose's unspoken caricature.

"Millionaires have legs," she said aloud. "I bet they can walk around like anybody else. However, I don't care who he is, if he'll send back my books."

Portia went back presently to the shop, and it wasn't long after that that her mother came down-stairs clad for the street, with her Modern Tendencies under her arm in a leather portfolio.

It had turned cold overnight, and there was a buffeting gusty wind which shook the windows and rattled the stiff branches of the trees. Her mother's valedictory, given with more confidence now that Portia was out of the house, was a strong recommendation that Rose stay quietly within doors and keep warm.

The girl might have palmed off her own inclination as an example of filial obedience, but she didn't.

"I was going to, anyway," she said. "Home and fireside for mine to-day."

Ordinarily, the gale would have tempted her. It was such good fun to lean up against it and force your way through, while it tugged at your skirts and hair and slapped your face.

But to-day, the warmest corner of the sitting-room lounge, the quiet of the house, deserted except for Inga in the kitchen, engaged in the principal sporting event of her domestic routine—the weekly baking; the fact that she needn't speak to a soul for three hours, a detective story just wild enough to make little intervals in the occupation of doing nothing at all—presented an ideal a hundred per cent. perfect.

She hadn't meant to go to sleep, having already slept away half the morning, but the author's tactics in the detective story were so flagrantly unfair, he was so manifestly engaged trying to make trouble for his poor anemic characters instead of trying to solve their perplexities, that presently she tossed the book aside and began dreaming one of her own in which the heroine got put off a street-car in the opening chapter.

The telephone bell roused her once or twice, far enough to observe that Inga was attending to it, so when the front door-bell rang, she left that to Inga, too—didn't even sit up and swing her legs off the couch and try, with a prodigious stretch, to get herself awake, until she heard the girl say casually:

"Her ban right in the sitting-room."

So it fell out that Rodney Aldrich had, for his second vivid picture of her,—the first had been, you will remember, when she had seized the conductor by both wrists, and had said in a blaze of beautiful wrath, "Don't dare to touch me like that!"—a splendid, lazy, tousled creature, in a chaotic glory of chestnut hair, an unlaced middy-blouse, a plaid skirt twisted round her knees, and a pair of ridiculous red bedroom slippers, with red pompons on the toes. The creature was stretching herself with the grace of a big cat that has just been roused from a nap on the hearth-rug.

If his first picture of her had been brief, his second one was practically a snap-shot, because at sight of him, she flashed to her feet.

So, for a moment, they confronted each other about equally aghast, flushed up to the hair, and simultaneously and incoherently, begging each other's pardon—neither could have said for what, the goddess out of the machine being Inga, the maid-of-all-work. But suddenly, at a twinkle she caught in his eye, her own big eyes narrowed and her big mouth widened into a smile, which broke presently into her deep-throated laugh, whereupon he laughed too, and they shook hands, and she asked him to sit down.

THE BIG HORSE

"It's too ridiculous," she said. "Since last night, when I got to thinking how I must have looked, wrestling with that conductor, I've been telling myself that if I ever saw you again, I'd try to act like a lady. But it's no use, is it?"

He said that he, too, had hoped to make a better impression the second time than the first. That was what he brought the books back for. He had hoped to convince her that a man capable of consigning a half-drowned girl to a ten-mile ride on the elevated, instead of walking her over to his sister's, having her dried out properly, and sent home in a motor, wasn't permanently and chronically as blithering an idiot as he may have seemed. It was a great load off of his mind to find her alive at all.

She gave him a humorously exaggerated account of the prophylactic measures her mother had submitted her to the night before, and she concluded:

"I'm awfully sorry mother's not at home—mother and my sister Portia. They'd both like to thank you for—looking after me last night. Because really, you did, you know."

"There never was anything less altruistic in the world," he assured her. "I dropped off of that car solely in pursuit of a selfish aim. And I didn't come out here to-day to be thanked, either. I mean, of course, I'd enjoy meeting your mother and sister very much, but what I came for was to get acquainted with you."

He saw her glance wander a little dubiously to the door. "That is," he concluded, "if you haven't something else to do."

She flushed and smiled. "No, it wasn't that," she said, "I was trying to make up my mind whether it would be better to ask you to wait here ten minutes while I went up and made myself a little more presentable.... I mean, whether you'd rather have me fit to look at, or have me like this and not be bored by waiting. It's all one to me, you see, because even if I did come down again presentable, you'd know—well, that I wasn't that way naturally."

Whereupon he laughed out again, told her that a ten-minute wait would bore him horribly, and that if she didn't mind, he much preferred her natural.

"All right," she said, and went on with the conversation where she had interrupted it.

"Why, I'm nobody much to get acquainted with," she said. "Mother's the interesting one—mother and Portia. Mother's quite a person. She's Naomi Rutledge Stanton, you know."

"I know I ought to know," Rodney said, and her quick appreciative smile over his candor rewarded him for not having pretended.

"Oh," she said, "mother's written two or three books, and lots of magazine articles, about women—women's rights and suffrage, and all that. She's been—well, sort of a leader ever since she graduated from college, back in—just think!—1870, when most girls used to have—accomplishments—'French, music, and washing extra,' you know."

She said it all with a quite adorable seriousness and his gravity matched hers when he replied:

"I would like to meet her very much. Feminism's a subject I'm blankly ignorant about."

"I don't believe," she said thoughtfully, "that I'd call it feminism in talking to mother about it, if I were you. Mother's a suffragist, but"—there came another wave of faint color along with her smile—"but—well, she's awfully respectable, you know."

She didn't seem to mind his laughing out at that, though she didn't join him.

"What about the other interesting member of the family," he asked presently, "your sister? Which is she, a suffragist or a feminist?"

"I suppose," she said, "you'll call Portia a feminist. Anyway, she smokes cigarettes. Oh, can't I get you some? I forgot!"

He had a case of his own in his pocket, he said, and got one out now and lighted it.

"Why," she went on, "Portia hasn't time to talk about it much. You see, she's a business woman. She's a house decorator. I don't mean painting and paper-hanging. She tells you what kind of furniture to buy, and then sells it to you. Portia's terribly clever and awfully independent."

"All right," he said. "That brings us down to you. What are you?"

She sighed. "I'm sort of a black sheep, I guess. I'm just in the university. But I'm to be a lawyer."

Whereupon he cried out "Good lord!" so explosively that she fairly jumped.

Then he apologized, said he didn't know why her announcement should have taken him like that, except that the notion of her in court trying a case—he was a lawyer himself—seemed rather startling.

She sighed. "And now I suppose," she said, "you'll advise me not to be. Portia won't hear of my being a decorator. She says there's nothing in it any more; and my two brothers—one's a professor of history and the other's a high-school principal—say, 'Let her do anything but teach.' One of mother's great friends is a doctor, and she says, 'Anything but medicine,' so I suppose you'll say, 'Anything but law.'"

"Not a bit," he said. "It's the finest profession in the world."

But he said it off the top of his mind. Down below, it was still engaged with the picture of her in a dismal court room, blazing up at a jury the way she had blazed up at that street-car conductor. It was a queer notion. He didn't know whether he liked it or not.

"I suppose," she hazarded, "that it's awfully dull and tiresome, though, until you get way up to the top."

That roused him. "It's awfully dull when you do get to the top, or what's called the top—being a client caretaker with the routine law business of a few big corporations and rich estates going through your office like grist through a mill. I can't imagine anything duller than that. That's supposed to be the big reward, of course. That's the bundle of hay they dangle in front of your nose to keep you trotting straight along without trying to see around your blinders."

He was out of his chair now, tramping up and down the room. "You're not supposed to discover that it's interesting. You're pretty well spoiled for their purposes if you do. The thing to bear in mind, if you're going to travel their road, is that a case is worth while in a precise and unalterable ratio to the amount of money involved in it. If you question that axiom at all seriously, you're lost. That's what happened to me."

He pulled up with a jerk, looked at her and laughed. "If my sister Frederica were here," he explained, "she would warn you, out of a long knowledge of my conversational habits, that now was the time for you to ask me,—firmly, you know,—if I'd been to see Maude Adams in this new thing of hers, or something like that. In Frederica's absence, I suppose it's only fair to warn you myself. Have you been to see it? I haven't."

She smiled in a sort of contented amusement and let that do for an answer to his question about Maude Adams. Then the smile transmuted itself into a look of thoughtful gravity and there was a long silence which, though it puzzled him, he made no move to break.

At last she pulled in a long breath, turned straight to him and said, "I wish you'd tell me what did happen to you."

And under the compelling sincerity of her, for the next two hours and a half, or thereabouts, he did—told it as he had never told it before—talked as Frederica, who thought she knew him, had never heard him talk.

He told her how he had started at the foot of the ladder in one of the big successful firms of what he called "client caretakers," drawing up bills and writs, rounding up witnesses in personal injury suits, trying little justice-shop cases—the worst of them, of course, because there was a youngster just ahead of him who got the better ones. And then, dramatically, he told of his discovery amid this chaff, of a real legal problem—a problem that for its nice intricacies and intellectual suggestiveness, would have brought an appreciative gleam to the eye of Mr. Justice Holmes, or Lord Mansfield, or the great Coke himself. He told of the passionate enthusiasm with which he had attacked it, the thrilling weeks of labor he had put on it. And then he told her the outcome of it all; how the head of the firm, an old friend of his father, had called him in and complimented him on the work that he had done; said it was very remarkable, but, unfortunately, not profitable to the firm, the whole amount involved in the case having been some twenty dollars. They were only paying him forty dollars a month, to be sure, but they figured that forty dollars practically a total loss and they thought he might better go to practising law for himself. In other words, he was fired.

But the thing that rang through the girl's mind like the clang of a bell—the thing that made her catch her breath, was the quality of the big laugh with which he concluded it. He didn't ask her to be sorry for him. He wasn't sorry for himself one bit,—nor bitter—nor cynical. He didn't even seem trying to make a merit of his refusal to acquiesce in that sordid point of view. He just dismissed the thing with a cymbal-like clash of laughter and plunged ahead with his story.

He told her how he'd got in with an altruistic bunch—the City Homes Association; how, finding him keen for work that they had little time for, the senior legal counselors had drawn out and let him do it. And from the way he told of his labors in drafting a new city building ordinance, she felt that it must have been one of the most fascinating occupations in the world, until he told her how it had drawn him into politics—municipal, city council politics, which was even more thrilling, and then how, after an election, a new state's attorney had offered him a position on his staff of assistants.

In a sense, of course, it was true that he had, as Frederica would have put it, forgotten she was there—had forgotten, at least, who she was. Because, if he had remembered that she was just a young girl in the university, he would hardly, as he tramped about the room expounding the practise of criminal law in the state's attorney's office, have characterized the state's attorney himself as a "damned gallery-playing mountebank," nor have described the professions and the misdeeds of some of the persons he prosecuted in blunt Anglo-Saxon terms she had never heard used except in the Bible.

The girl knew he had forgotten, and her only discomfort came from the fear that the spell might be broken and he remember suddenly and be embarrassed and stop.

In the deeper sense—and she was breathlessly conscious of this too—he hadn't forgotten she was there. He was telling it all because she was there—because she was herself and nobody else. She knew, though how she couldn't have explained,—with that intuitive certainty that is the only real certainty there is,—that the story couldn't have been evoked from him in just that way, by any one else in the world.

At the end of two years in the state's attorney's office, he told her, he figured he had had his training and was ready to begin.

"I made just one resolution when I hung out my shingle," he said, "and that was that no matter how few cases I got, I wouldn't take any that weren't interesting—that didn't give me something to bite on. A lot of my friends thought I was crazy, of course—the ones who came around because they liked me, or had liked my father, to offer me nice plummy little sinecures, and got told I didn't want them. Just for the sake of looking successful and accumulating a lot of junk I didn't want, I wasn't going to asphyxiate myself, have strings tied to my arms and legs like a damned marionette. I wasn't willing to be bored for any reward they had to offer me. It's cynical to be bored. It's the worst immorality there is. Well, and I never have been."

It wasn't all autobiographical and narrative. There was a lot of his deep-breathing, spacious philosophy of life mixed up in it. And this the girl, consciously, and deliberately, provoked. It didn't need much. She said something about discipline and he snatched the word away from her.

"What is discipline? Why, it's standing the gaff—standing it, not submitting to it. It's accepting the facts of life—of your own life, as they happen to be. It isn't being conquered by them. It's not making masters of them, but servants to the underlying things you want."

She tried to make a reservation there—suppose the things you wanted weren't good things.

But he wouldn't allow it.

"Whatever they are," he insisted, "your desires are the only motive forces you've got. No matter how fine your intelligence is, it can't ride anywhere except on the backs of your own passions. There's no good lamenting that they're not different, and it's silly to beat them to death and make a merit of not having ridden anywhere because they might have carried you into trouble. Learn to ride them—control them—spur them. But don't forget that they're you just as essentially as the rider is."

It was with a curiously relaxed body, her chin cradled in the crook of her arm that lay along the back of the couch, her eyes unfocused on the window, that the girl listened to it.

Primarily, indeed, she wasn't exactly listening. Much of the narrative went by almost unheard. Much of the philosophy she hardly tried to understand. What was constantly present and more and more poignantly vivid with every five minutes that ticked away on the banjo clock, was a consciousness of the man himself, the driving power of him, the boisterous health and freshness and confidence. She was conscious, too, of something formidable—carelessly exultant in his own strength. She got to thinking of the flight of a great bird wheeling up higher and higher on his powerful wings.

He had caught her up, too, and was carrying her to altitudes far beyond her own powers. He might drop her, but if he did, it wouldn't be through weakness. At what he said about riding on the backs of one's own passions, her imagination varied the picture so that she saw him galloping splendidly by.

At that, suddenly and to her consternation, she felt her eyes flushing up with tears. She tried to blink them away, but they came too fast.

Presently he stopped short in his walk—stopped talking, with a gasp, in the middle of a sentence, and looked into her face. She couldn't see his clearly, but she saw his hands clench and heard him draw a long breath. Then he turned abruptly and walked to the window and for a mortal endless minute, there was a silence.

At last she found something—it didn't matter much what—to say, and the conversation between them, on the surface of it, was just what it had been for the first ten minutes after he had come in. But, paradoxically, this superficial commonplaceness only heightened the tensity of the thing that underlay it. Something had happened during that moment while he stood looking into her tear-flushed eyes; something momentous, critical, which no previous experience in her life had prepared her for.

And it had happened to him, too. The memory of his silhouette as he stood there with his hands clenched, between her and the window, would have convinced her, had she needed convincing.

The commonplace thing she had found to say met, she knew, a need that was his as well as hers, for breathing-space—for time for the recovery of lost bearings. Had he not felt it as well as she—she smiled a little over this—he wouldn't have yielded. The man on horseback would have taken an obstacle like that without breaking the stride of his gallop.

What underlay her quiet meaningless chat, was wonder and fear, and more deeply still, a sort of cosmic contentment—the acquiescence of a swimmer in the still irresistible current of a mighty river.

It was distinctly a relief to her when her mother came in and, presently, Portia. She introduced him to them, and then dropped out of the conversation altogether. As if it were a long way off, she heard him retailing last night's adventure and expressing his regret that he hadn't taken her to Frederica (that was his sister, Mrs. Whitney) to be dried out, before he sent her home.

She was aware that Portia stole a look at her in a puzzled penetrating sort of way every now and then, but didn't concern herself as to the basis of her curiosity. She knew that it was getting on toward their dinner-time, but didn't disturb herself as to the effect Inga's premonitory rattlings out in the dining-room might have on her guest. As a matter of fact, they had none whatever.

She smiled once widely to herself, over a thought of the half-back. The man here in the room with her now, chatting so pleasantly with her mother, wouldn't ask for favors—would accept nothing that wasn't offered as eagerly as it was sought.

It wasn't until he rose to go that she aroused herself and went with him into the hall. There, after he'd got into his overcoat and hooked his stick over his arm, he held out his hand to her in formal leave-taking. Only it didn't turn out that way. For the effect of that warm lithe grip flew its flag in both their faces.

"You're such a wonder!" he said.

She smiled. "So are y-you." It was the first time she had ever stammered in her life.

When she came back into the sitting-room, she found Portia inclined to be severe.

"Did you ask him to come again?" she wanted to know.

Rose smiled. "I never thought of it," she said.

"Perhaps it's just as well," said Portia. "Did you have anything at all to say to him before we came home, or were you like that all the while? How long ago did he come?"

"I don't know," said Rose behind a very real yawn. "I was asleep on the couch when he came in. That's why I was dressed like this." And then she said she was hungry.

There wasn't, on the whole, a happier person in the world at that moment.

Because Rodney Aldrich, pounding along at five miles an hour, in a direction left to chance, was not happy. Or, if he was, he didn't know it. He couldn't yield instantly, and easily, to his intuitions, as Rose had done. He felt that he must think—felt that he had never stood in such dire need of cool level consideration as at this moment:

But the process was impossible. That fine instrument of precision, his mind, that had, for many years, done without complaint the work he gave it to do, had simply gone on a strike. Instead of ratiocinating properly, it presented pictures. Mainly four: a girl, flaming with indignation, holding a street-car conductor pinned by the wrists; a girl in absurd bedroom slippers, her skirt twisted around her knees, her hair a chaos, stretching herself awake like a big cat; a girl with wonderful, blue, tear-brimming eyes, from whose glory he had had to turn away. Last of all, the girl who had said with that adorable stammer, "So are y-you," and smiled a smile that had summed up everything that was desirable in the world.

It was late that night when his mind, in a dazed sort of way, came back on the job. And the first thing it pointed out to him was that Frederica had undoubtedly been right in telling him that, though they had lived together off and on for thirty years, they didn't know each other. The pictures his memory held of his sister, covered no such emotional range as these four. Did Martin's? It seemed absurd, yet there was a strong intrinsic probability of it.

Anyway, it was a remark Frederica had made last night that gave him something to hold on by. Marriage, she had said, was an adventure, the essential adventurousness of which no amount of cautious thought taken in advance could modify. There was no doubt in his mind that marriage with that girl would be a more wonderful adventure than any one had ever had in the world.

All right then, perhaps his mind had been right in refusing to take up the case. The one tremendous question,—would the adventure look promising enough to her to induce her to embark on it?—was one which his own reasoning powers could not be expected to answer. It called simply for experiment.

So, turning off his mind again, with the electric light, he went to bed.